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IASP Curriculum Outline on Pain for Medicine

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Outline Summary

Introduction

The widespread prevalence of pain demonstrates the need for comprehensive pain education for all health-care professionals. Yet not all require the same type of pain-related knowledge and skills. IASP encourages all medical school programs to use the following curriculum outline to embed pain education and training. As with all health professions, an objective of the curriculum is to instill the knowledge and skills necessary to advance the science and management of pain as part of an interprofessional team. The desired outcomes of education emphasize critical competencies that support the humanistic aspects of health care and the learner’s capacity to successfully carry out tasks in the real world. The fundamental concepts and complexity of pain include how pain is observed and assessed, collaborative approaches to treatment options, and application of pain competencies across the lifespan in the context of various settings, populations, and care-team models.

Changing the curriculum of medical schools is challenging, and this curriculum outline will stimulate comments, criticisms, and suggestions. The hope is that those involved in planning medical school curricula will use the outline to draw the attention of their colleagues to the areas that ought to be covered if graduates are to be adequately prepared to manage pain.

Obviously, there are as many ways of covering the topics in the outline as there are medical schools. A general suggestion on the practical use of the outline is to address each item as part of basic, clinical, or social sciences early in the medical school curriculum followed by a comprehensive pain medicine course late in the curriculum. Examples that complement this outline are the medical school curriculum in Germany, which requires attention to pain medicine, as well as the European undergraduate pain medicine curriculum, both of which are cited in the References at the end of this document.

Principles

The following principles guide the pain curriculum for the entry-level physician:

Pain is a multidimensional experience requiring comprehensive and ongoing assessment and effective management.

Physicians play an essential role in the prevention, diagnosis and management of acute and persistent pain.

Objectives

Physicians upon completing this entry-level pain curriculum will be able to:

Recognize pain medicine as a necessary field in clinical practice for acute and persistent (chronic) pain conditions

Understand the basic science of pain-processing components such as anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology

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